August 18, 2004

7 1/2 Days: Reporter Kevin Heldman was confined on Woodhull
posted by shotsy 20 years ago
  • Interesting find... I'm sure I should be able to say I'm shocked and stunned. I'm not.
  • Having been on the "inside" several times, I agree with much of this. The psychiatry/pharma racket seems to "create" as many handsomely paying clients for itself as the tort lawsuit industry does. No, not a surprise, really.
  • Not that this isn't interesting, but this article's six years old.
  • Oh, man! It's both shocking and not surprising that attitudes in those places haven't changed at all since I spent a year working in a hospital for retarded people in California 40 years ago. While some of the issues were different (the patients were, for the most part, not able to take care of themselves in the outside world without a lot of support, and some of them could never leave the hospital environment - think a 10 year old who was about the size of of a one year old, who's eyes couldn't focus and who still had to be bottle fed, or a child who had been relatively bright until the fluid pressure in her head caused her cranium to about equal the size of her body, while her brain was squished. She still had a really sweet smile when I worked on her ward.) The uncaring nature is the same. As is the abuse (maybe worse for the retarded.) In that environment, one might have expected doctors to check on the effects of medication and change pharmacy orders, but that never happened. What the patient came in with was what he/she got. So, some of them slept night and day, and some of them stayed up all night, smearing feces wherever they could. But, we were taught to not get too close to the patients since that might make us favor one patient over another, and, paying any normal attention was considered favoritism. I can't help but feel that that's till going on and explains some of what the reporter experienced.
  • Christ, path, that is so terribly sad. To not be allowed normal attention by those who can help you, those who are often closest to you. How heartbreaking. I could not do it. I would cry everyday.
  • but this article's six years old Yeah. Just imagine how big that bill would be nowadays.
  • Both the post link and the one provided by Raoul are, well, I don't know what word to use ... I guess, depressing. Frightening might be another good word for them. They make me glad that the one time in my life I was so depressed I thought I should go to a mental health institution to get help, that I stayed in bed for a month and drank heavily. It did me as much good as checking into one of these places would have done, and didn't harm me as much as doing so might have. I'd have gone nuts in circumstances like the ones described here.